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Coordinating a poetry collection with multiple authors

Posted: July 9th, 2018, 5:35 pm
by ChuckW
So I'm currently thinking about coordinating James Weldon Johnson's The Book of American Negro Poetry as a group project. It seems like it should be a relatively easy project to put together, but I do have a couple of weird questions that are particular to this book. I might need an MC to weigh in on some of these.

1) The preface is a major problem. It’s unbelievably long—almost 11,000 words—and will probably have to be split up into 2-3 separate sections. However, I've never seen a book on Librivox where the preface (usually denoted as "00" in the filenames) was broken up into multiple recordings. Is this acceptable? Or should I just try to find some particularly masochistic volunteer willing to record all 11,000+ words of the preface?

2) The book is organized into 31 chapters, each spotlighting a different author. Some chapters (like the one on Claude McKay) are pretty long (can't blame them—he's a great poet!). Others are really short, with only one or two poems. Should I allow volunteers to select different sections based on individual poems? Or would it be a better idea to maintain the author-centric chapter breaks and have volunteers claim an entire block of poems (regardless of whether it's one of the larger or smaller sections)?

Sorry if these are dumb questions. I've never put together a poetry collection before.

Re: Coordinating a poetry collection with multiple authors

Posted: July 9th, 2018, 6:03 pm
by annise
re the preface
It doesn't have to be 0 , . In books with chapters it's nice if possible for section 1 to be chapter 1 if possible but this is a chapter so I'd start at 1 and have intro part 1 , intro part 2 etc ,
How you split the rest is up to you and how long the poems are , . Having 1 poet per section is probably good but that doesn't mean you need 1 section per poet.
Having sections titled
Poet 1
Poet 2
poet 3 part 1
Poet part 2
would work (with their names not poet 1 :D

Anne

Re: Coordinating a poetry collection with multiple authors

Posted: July 9th, 2018, 6:03 pm
by TriciaG
My opinions:

You can split up the preface, no problem. In a case like that, I wouldn't bother numbering the first section as 00. Might as well start with 01, since they don't correspond to anything anyway.

I'd keep authors together - breaking up chapters that are longer into parts. So you might have one author's section/chapter that is 3 minutes long and another author that has 3 sections of 30 minutes each. That makes sense to me, even though the sections would be very different lengths.

I would not consider this a "poetry collection" in the sense of it being a compilation. The individual poems would not be searchable in the catalog.

(Anne's post basically says the same thing as mine.)

Re: Coordinating a poetry collection with multiple authors

Posted: July 9th, 2018, 8:20 pm
by ChuckW
Thanks all! That helps a lot!

I'll probably launch this in a month or so. I'd considered doing it sooner, but it looks like we've got an overabundance of new projects trying to find DPLs right now. Don't want to add to the surplus. :-)

Re: Coordinating a poetry collection with multiple authors

Posted: July 9th, 2018, 8:37 pm
by annise
congratlations on considering DPL needs , but there aren't any English ones wanted that I saw for poetry so I think it would be OK to go ahead now :D

Anne

Re: Coordinating a poetry collection with multiple authors

Posted: July 10th, 2018, 12:18 pm
by ChuckW
annise wrote: July 9th, 2018, 8:37 pm congratlations on considering DPL needs , but there aren't any English ones wanted that I saw for poetry so I think it would be OK to go ahead now :D

Anne
Well, if you're going to twist my arm... :lol:

Here it is: viewtopic.php?f=28&t=70937